“That’s funny,” Kelp said. “That’s the same news we were gonna tell you.”
“Not that funny,” Tiny said.
Stan said, “So you guys saw it, too, all that crap in the storage place?”
“No,” Kelp said. “We didn’t look in there. That was always supposed to be the fake thing anyway, so we could go after the cash going to Europe. But that didn’t work either, so finally we just walked off.”
“We walked off,” Tiny said, “because we were accused of stealing cars.”
“Oh,” Stan said.
Kelp said, “If you planned to go back there tonight, bring a toothbrush.”
“So that’s over, is what you’re saying,” Stan said. “The whole reality thing. And we all knew it at the same time. So now what we got to do is figure out what we are gonna do.”
Kelp said, “Anybody got any prospects? Anything might help?”
Stan said, “Hold that for a minute. All that storytelling, I used up my beer.” Rising, he said, “Anybody else? Kid?”
“Sure,” the kid said.
“Tiny?”
“I’m okay,” Tiny said.
Kelp said, “John and me, we’ve got this bottle.”
“Fine,” Stan said. “I’ll be right back.”
Holding his empty glass, he turned and opened the door, and Doug was standing there. Doug’s anxious expression switched to pleased surprise and he said, “Stan! When’d you get back?”
Stan closed the door.
40
NO. THEY COULDN’T DO THAT. They couldn’t just ignore him, could they? Doug stared at the closed door, right there in front of his nose, and he couldn’t believe it. He’d seen them, the four guys sitting around the table just exactly like the OJ back room footage they’d shot, plus Stan right there in the doorway, and the next thing, Stan slams the door. Right in front of him.
They can’t do that. They can’t pretend they’re not in there, not after he saw them. Did they think he’d just go away? Well, he wouldn’t go away. He couldn’t go away. He needed those guys. He needed The Heist, now more than ever.
When he’d discovered, this afternoon, how circumstances had changed, and how much he now needed The Heist to get itself up and running again, he’d tried to think of some way to get back in touch with the guys. He’d known immediately there would be no gain in trying to work through Stan’s Mom. She’d just brush him off and promise to pass on a message and then go out and drive her cab some more.
He couldn’t have that. He needed to talk to the guys themselves, he needed to explain to them what dire straits he was in, call on their better natures, convince them to come back to The Heist, no matter what. But how could he reach them?
When all of a sudden he’d thought of the OJ, the real OJ up there on Amsterdam Avenue, and realized that place was almost certainly going to go on being their hangout, because people are creatures of habit and like to go back to where they’ve already been comfortable, he wondered, very briefly, if he dared go there and lie in wait for them. It was brief because what choice did he have?
But would that be going over a line, somehow, moving into some private space of theirs, slipping into the completely unacceptable? Would he be testing the limits of their nonviolence if he were suddenly to appear among them at their own personal OJ?
Well, it didn’t matter, he just had to do it. So he made himself come to the OJ tonight a little after ten, half-hoping this would not be a night when they were present here, and when he walked into the place he saw the bartender in patient but apparently indecisive conversation with a foreign person who appeared to be unequipped in English. This distraction had made it easy for Doug to slide on by the chattering habitués at the left end of the bar and hurry down the hall to that closed back room door. When he leaned against it, ear to the old wood, he could just hear the murmur of voices, but not what they were saying.
They were here! His heart pounding, Doug tried to decide what to do. Should he just barge in on them and hope to talk fast enough so they’d understand his problem before they threw him out? Or should he simply knock on the door, like any normal visitor, which might provoke who knew what kind of response? Or should he leave them their private space and go back out to the bar and take a table there and order a drink—yes to that part—and wait for them to come out, in hopes that then and there he could talk to them, persuade them, convince them?
It was an impossible situation. He stood there, indecisive, trying to find some ray of hope in any of the options before him, stood there who knows how long, and all of a sudden the door opened, and there was Stan, of all people, with the other four seated at the table behind him. Doug had greeted Stan with honest surprise and pleasure, and Stan had responded by slamming the door in his face. (Well, closing the door, but still.)
He had to go forward. He could not retreat. And he could not simply wait for them to open this door again; that might be hours from now. He had to force the issue, dammit, force the issue. Firmly he reached out and turned the knob and opened the door.
They were all seated now, at all the chairs except the one with its back to Doug. “Guys, I’m sorry I—” Doug started, and all five of them reared back to point in various directions and tell him in various loud and pungent ways to get lost.
“I need you guys!” he cried. “I’m in terrible trouble. Please, just listen to me. Let me tell you what happened.”
Something in his desperate manner caught their attention, if not their interest, or their sympathy. They looked at one another, and then Tiny said, “You wanna tell us a story.”
“A story? I—” Then he nodded, quickly. “That’s right,” he said. “I want to tell you a story.”
“Then you go back out there,” Tiny said, “and you tell Rollo, you came here to see what the boys in the back room will have, and they will have another round. And these two will have another bottle. All on you.”
“Oh, I know that,” Doug said, but couldn’t resist adding, “all on the production. No problem. I’ll be right back.”
When he hurried out to the bar, the foreign gentleman was gone and the bartender was picking up random glasses from the backbar, wiping them a little bit with a small towel, and putting them down again. Doug caught his attention, made his request, handed over his credit card, got it back, and the bartender slid over to him a tray containing a bottle that claimed to contain bourbon, two draft beers, a glass of gin and tonic and ice and lemon peel (his own addition), and a glass of red liquid that was undoubtedly not cherry soda.
“Tell them I’ll grab the trays later,” the bartender said.
“I will. Thank you.”
The tray was too heavy and too tippy to carry one-handed, so Doug carried it in two hands, which, at the other end of the hall, meant the only way to deal with the door was not to knock on it but to kick it, which seemed aggressive but couldn’t be avoided. So he kicked it, gently, and Stan, on his feet again, opened to him and said, “Good. That’s good. You did good. Sit there.”
So he sat with his back to the door and said, “I really appreciate this, fellas.”
“Tell us the story,” Tiny said.
“All right.” Doug lubricated a bit with gin and tonic and said, “Just to give the highlight, The Stand fell apart. Today. While we were downtown.”
Andy said, “Fell apart? The vegetable stand?”
“No, the whole show.” Doug needed more lubrication. “All at once, Kirby, the younger son, the one that wanted to come out of the closet on a G-rated series, all at once he runs off with a human cannonball from some cheap one-ring circus going through those small towns up there. At the same time, the older son, Lowell, the shy intellectual on the show, decides to go into a Buddhist monastery up in Vermont with a vow of silence, and, needless to say, no telephone. And what apparently set them both off was because the parents, with no warning at all, announced they’re getting divorced, because she’s in love with the family plumber and he’s tired of northern winters and he’s taken a j
ob managing a chain motel in Tahiti. They’re all gone, there’s nobody there to run the stand, and the truth is, it was never a viable business anyway, the only reason to have a stand like that in a location like that was because of the show. So now it’s gone and we’ve got nothing.”
Tiny said, “Do something else.”
“I’d love to do something else,” Doug told him, “but you’d be amazed how many topics have already been covered by reality shows. Undertakers. Plastic surgeons. Long-distance truckers. Polygamists, though tastefully. And besides, I’ve still got another problem.”
Andy said, “I know this is mean to say, but somehow I can’t get enough of your problems, Doug. Lay it on us.”
“Before we knew you guys were gonna ankle,” Doug said, “we put together a rough cut of the season so far and showed it to the next level of bosses, up at Monopole, and they love it. They think it’s gonna be a breakout. They’re already selling it overseas.”
Everybody took a minute to absorb that, and then the kid said, “That guy Ray you sent us, the ringer—”
“He really does walk on walls,” Doug said.
“We know,” the kid said. “And we also know he really is an actor, and the reason he was there was to spy on us and report to you.”
“Well, I wouldn’t phrase it like that,” Doug said. “Besides, what does that have to do with anything?”
“Cast us all with actors,” the kid said.
“Great idea,” Andy said. “You’re not showing our faces anyway.”
“But that isn’t reality,” Doug objected. “That isn’t the way it works.”
John said, “Why not? How real is reality anyway?”
“Real enough,” Doug said. “If we use actors, then it’s got to be a scripted show, so then we need writers, and all at once we’re into unions and all kinds of other expenses and it prices us right out of the market. The whole point of reality shows is to give the networks a way to fill airtime on the cheap.”
John said, “Okay, I see your problem, so now let me tell you our problem. There’s no robbery there.”
Doug didn’t grasp that at all. “But,” he said, “you agreed Knickerbocker Storage would be bound to have—”
“It doesn’t,” Stan said, in the flat tone of one who knows.
“It was always a fake anyway,” John said.
Doug said, “A fake? Why? How?”
“Well, mostly,” Andy said, “it’s your fault.”
“Oh, not something else,” Doug said.
John said, “You remember, way back when, we’re trying to figure out what job you’d like to make a movie of, and I said something about cash, and you said you never saw cash anywhere—”
“And then you hiccupped,” Andy said.
Doug looked at him. “I did?”
“We both noticed it,” Andy said. “All of a sudden, you remembered where you’d seen cash, and you tried to cover up for it.”
“So it looked to us,” John said, “that Combined Tool, down on Varick Street, was the most likely place you saw cash. Because it was the most high-tech door locks in America. So that’s why we said Knickerbocker Storage, so we could knock over Combined Tool while you’re taking pictures of Knickerbocker Storage.”
“Oh, my God,” Doug said. “And that’s why you had to pretend Stan wasn’t involved any more, because we knew his last name and how to find him.”
“But then it turned out,” John said, “we were right but we were wrong. Cash going to Europe, like we thought, but not kept on Varick Street, just in the suitcase of the German guy staying overnight, every once in a while. We can’t use that, cash comes in, goes right out, we never know the schedule. We need cash there, right there, all the time. So that’s why—”
John stopped and frowned at Doug, who suddenly felt guilty or self-conscious or something. “What?” he said. “What?”
John looked at Doug but spoke to Andy. “Did you see that?”
“I sure did,” Andy said.
“Even I saw that,” Tiny said.
Grinning, the kid said, “Give us the good news, Doug.”
“Good news? What do you mean?” But already, Doug understood. Somehow, he’d given himself away. The same as last time, they’d read him, quietly but intensely. Oh, what did they know now?
Andy said to John, “You think it’s in the midtown offices? That’s another set of problems.”
“Well,” John said, “probly what we’d do, we’d dismantle an elevator, maybe with two-three people inside it, then use the stairs and blow the office door out while security’s going nuts over their elevator. Choose a doctor’s office on a lower floor, spend the night there, go out in the morning with the incoming personnel.”
Andy said, “Depending where this cash is.”
“Well, yeah.”
Andy gave Doug his brightest most cheerful look. “Where is it, Doug?”
“Please,” Doug said. “Don’t do this. You’re asking me to commit a crime.”
Andy said, “You’re asking us to commit a crime. And you’re gonna profit from it.”
“But I…” Doug said, and ran down.
He didn’t know what to do. Nobody had lured him into this. He’d lured himself into it. But how could he get out of this mess without losing The Heist? And how could he save The Heist without putting himself into terrible trouble? He reached for his glass, and to his shock it was empty. A few tiny ice cubes, a curl of lemon peel.
What to do? He didn’t dare leave this room to get another drink. But how to go on without one?
John said, “That empty? Have some of ours. We got plenty.” And he pointed at the “bourbon” bottle.
Doug shook his head. “No, John, I couldn’t—”
“There’s ice cubes in the bowl,” Andy offered. “Calms the taste. Just put the lemon on that tray there.”
“Go ahead,” said John.
So Doug dumped out his lemon peel, dropped in a few ice cubes, and poured out a few fingers of the brown liquid.
Meanwhile, returning to the business at hand, John said, “If there’s cash up in the midtown offices, and if it’s there all the time, or even most of the time, then maybe we could work something out to get our hands on it, and you can still make your show.”
To stall, Doug sipped from his glass, and immediately his face puckered up like a pine tree knot. He blinked away sudden moisture in his eyes and said, “You guys drink this all the time?”
“Only on occasions,” John said.
“Well, my respect for you has just increased,” Doug said.
“Thank you, Doug.”
Andy said, “Where in the office is it, Doug?”
Doug sighed. No escape. “Not in the office,” he said.
John said, “Someplace else? We figured, either midtown or Varick Street.”
“No, you were right,” Doug said. He was suddenly very tired, as though he’d been undergoing severe interrogation for a week. He swallowed a bit more of the brown liquid and sighed.
John said, “You mean, it is on Varick Street? But Muller just brings it overnight and takes it away.”
“No,” Doug said. “This is other cash. I’ve never met these people, I understand they’re very dangerous. Even Babe keeps out of their way. They’re from somewhere in Asia, Malaysia or Macao or somewhere like that.”
“Tell us about it, Doug,” Andy suggested.
“Asia’s the new opening-up market,” Doug told them. “It’s very Wild West out there, all the big companies have local teams to take care of local problems. You know, even in Russia you gotta hire a Russian that’s gonna know who you bribe and who you don’t have to.”
“This is what we were figuring,” John said.
“Well, that’s what it is. We have to keep cash available because you never know when there’s gonna be a change in government or your contact gets murdered, or whatever. We can’t keep cash there, too dangerous, so we keep it here, on Varick Street, and a few of our Asian—associates, I g
uess—they have access to Combined Tool, and when there’s an emergency they come and take. When things go wrong over there, they go wrong all of a sudden, so that’s why we have to have that money handy. Please don’t ask me where it’s kept.”
“No, we wouldn’t, Doug,” Andy said. “You’d be going too far to tell us something like that.”
“Besides,” the kid said, “we oughta do some of our own work. Right, guys?”
Solemnly, the guys all nodded their agreement.
Doug tried to keep his eye on the prize and ignore the crocodiles around his ankles. “Does this mean,” he said, “you’ll come back to the show?”
“But just to film Knickerbocker Storage,” Andy said. “None of this other stuff.”
“Oh, I know. I wouldn’t want to…” And he let the sentence trail away, afraid to find out what he wouldn’t want to cause to occur.
“We could even make it tomorrow morning at ten,” Andy said.
“Oh, I think two,” Doug said. “After lunch. I’ll need to get everything set up.”
His glass seemed to be empty again, somehow. Rising, he said, “Whatever happens, I’m glad we’ll be going on with it.”
They announced similar feelings, and Doug turned to the door, and the kid said, “Doug Fairkeep?”
Confused, Doug turned around. “Yes?”
“That is you, right?” the kid said. “Doug Fairkeep?”
“You know that,” Doug said. “What’s the point?”
The kid held up his cell phone. “If it should happen, someday,” he said, “that a cop, or a boss of yours, listens to this conversation, we’d want him to be sure he knew who he was listening to.”
Andy said, “You see, Doug, you coming here to the OJ like this, and seeing Stan here, we understood we had to get to a place where you weren’t a threat to us any more than we were a threat to you.”
“I see,” Doug said. “Don’t lose that phone, kid.”
“I won’t,” the kid promised.
In the cab going downtown, Doug believed he now understood the sensations felt by a person slowly sinking into the grasp of an octopus. Play dead, he told himself.
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